Beneath the genteel surface of Hampstead village, far below the Georgian terraces and the chestnut-lined pavements, lies a world that few of the neighbourhood's residents ever think about. It is a world of tunnels and shafts, of iron rings and compressed clay, of ventilation ducts and emergency staircases that plunge deep into the London Clay like the burrows of some immense subterranean creature. This is Underground Hampstead — the network of tube tunnels, platforms, and passageways that was carved out of the earth more than a century ago to connect the hilltop village with the city below. It is a story of extraordinary engineering ambition, of financial gambles that paid off spectacularly, and of a hidden infrastructure that continues to function, day after day, carrying millions of passengers through the darkness beneath one of London's most celebrated neighbourhoods.
Hampstead tube station holds a record that it has never relinquished since the day it opened on 22 June 1907: it is the deepest station on the London Underground. Its platforms lie 58.5 metres — one hundred and ninety-two feet — below the street level at the junction of Heath Street and the High Street. To put this in perspective, the depth is greater than the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and it exceeds the depth of every other station on the entire Underground network, including those on the Jubilee Line Extension and the deep-level Central Line stations beneath the City. This extraordinary depth was a consequence of Hampstead's unique topography: the village sits on the highest ground in London, and the tube tunnels had to pass beneath the summit of the hill at a level that was far below anything that the Underground's engineers had previously attempted.
Charles Yerkes and the Vision for the Hampstead Tube
The man who conceived the Hampstead tube was Charles Tyson Yerkes, a figure who deserves to be far better known than he is. Yerkes was an American financier — a former convict, a serial bankrupt, and a man of extraordinary vision and ruthless determination. Born in Philadelphia in 1837, he had made his first fortune in street railway franchises in Chicago, where his methods were so rapacious that Theodore Dreiser used him as the model for Frank Cowperwood, the protagonist of his novel The Financier. After a series of financial and political reverses in Chicago, Yerkes turned his attention to London, arriving in the capital in 1900 with a plan to transform its nascent tube network into a comprehensive urban transport system.
Yerkes understood something that many of his British contemporaries did not: that tube railways were not merely transport infrastructure but instruments of urban development. A new tube line did not simply move people from one place to another; it created entirely new patterns of settlement, opening up areas that had previously been too remote for commuters and transforming rural villages into thriving suburbs. The key to profitability was not the fares charged to passengers but the increase in land values that a new line generated along its route. This insight — which Yerkes had learned from the Chicago street railway business — drove his strategy in London, and the Hampstead tube was its most ambitious expression.
The Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway, as the line was officially known, was authorised by Parliament in 1893 but languished for years for lack of capital. Yerkes acquired the concession in 1900 and immediately set about raising the funds needed to build it. His financing was characteristically bold: he issued bonds secured against the future revenues of the line, borrowed heavily from American and Continental banks, and used the construction contracts themselves as collateral for further borrowing. The financial structure was precarious — when Yerkes died in December 1905, his personal finances were found to be in chaos — but the engineering was sound, and the line was completed and opened on schedule in June 1907.
The route ran from Charing Cross (now Embankment) northwards through Tottenham Court Road, Goodge Street, Warren Street, and Euston, before continuing through Camden Town, Chalk Farm, Belsize Park, and finally Hampstead. The northern terminus was originally planned for a site near the Bull and Bush pub on North End Road, but the failure to develop the land around the proposed station led to the terminus being established at Hampstead village instead. The extension to Golders Green and Edgware came later, in 1907 and 1924 respectively.
Engineering the Deepest Station
The construction of Hampstead station presented engineering challenges of an order that had not been encountered on any previous tube project. The primary difficulty was depth. The station's platforms had to be situated at a level that would allow the running tunnels to pass beneath the summit of Hampstead Hill with adequate cover — that is, with sufficient thickness of clay above the tunnels to prevent subsidence at the surface. Given Hampstead's elevation of approximately 135 metres above sea level, and the gradient limitations of the tube tunnels, this meant that the platforms had to be placed at a depth of 58.5 metres below street level.
Reaching this depth required the sinking of lift shafts through the London Clay, a process that was both technically demanding and physically dangerous. The shafts were sunk using the compressed-air method: the working chamber at the bottom of the shaft was pressurised to prevent groundwater from flooding in, and the excavated material was hoisted to the surface in buckets. The work was carried out by gangs of navvies — many of them Irish immigrants — who laboured in conditions of extreme discomfort, working in twelve-hour shifts in the cramped, pressurised chamber. The risk of caisson disease, commonly known as the bends, was a constant danger, and several workers were hospitalised during the construction period.
The tunnels themselves were bored using the Greathead shield, a cylindrical tunnelling machine that had been developed by James Henry Greathead for the City and South London Railway in the 1880s. The shield was pushed forward through the clay by hydraulic rams, and as it advanced, the tunnel behind it was lined with cast-iron segments that were bolted together to form a continuous ring. The process was slow but reliable, and the quality of the London Clay — which is relatively dry and stable at depth — made tunnelling easier than it might have been in other geological conditions. The running tunnels at Hampstead have an internal diameter of approximately 3.56 metres, and they are among the deepest on the entire Underground network.
The station itself was designed by Leslie Green, the architect who was responsible for the entire series of stations on the Yerkes group of tube lines. Green's stations are among the most recognisable buildings in London: their facades of ox-blood red glazed terracotta, manufactured by the Leeds Fireclay Company, are a distinctive feature of the Edwardian streetscape, and they have been designated as Grade II listed buildings. Hampstead station's facade is a compact but elegant composition, with arched windows, a semi-circular name panel, and the Underground roundel that was just beginning to establish itself as one of the most powerful brand identities in the world.
The Emergency Spiral Staircase: 320 Steps to Daylight
One of the most remarkable features of Hampstead station — and one that most passengers never see — is its emergency spiral staircase. This staircase, which winds around the inside of one of the lift shafts, provides a means of escape from platform level to the surface in the event that the lifts are out of service. It contains 320 steps, making it the longest emergency staircase on the Underground and one of the longest spiral staircases in Britain.
The staircase was installed as a safety requirement when the station was built in 1906-1907. The Board of Trade, which was responsible for railway safety at the time, insisted that all deep-level tube stations must have an alternative means of egress in addition to the lifts. At shallower stations, this requirement could be met by escalators (which were introduced to the Underground from 1911 onwards) or by relatively short staircases. But at Hampstead, the depth was so great that an escalator was considered impractical — the technology of the day could not produce a reliable escalator of the required length — and a conventional staircase would have been prohibitively long and would have occupied too much space. The solution was a spiral staircase, which occupied less horizontal space than a straight staircase while still providing a continuous path from platform to surface.
The staircase is constructed of cast iron, with treads that are slightly worn from more than a century of occasional use. The spiral is tight — each revolution covers approximately one storey of vertical height — and the ascent is physically demanding. Staff at Hampstead station have occasionally used the staircase for charity fundraising events, challenging participants to climb the full 320 steps in the fastest possible time. The current record is reported to be just under four minutes, though this is unofficial and unverified. For most people, the climb takes considerably longer, and the experience of emerging into daylight after several minutes of continuous spiralling is mildly disorienting.
The staircase is not open to the public under normal circumstances, and passengers who find themselves at Hampstead when the lifts are out of service are usually advised to travel to an adjacent station and make alternative arrangements. On the rare occasions when the staircase has been used for general passenger access — during lift failures or station evacuations — the response of passengers has been a mixture of fascination and dismay. The novelty of climbing 320 steps wears off after the first hundred or so, and by the time the surface is reached, the average commuter is more interested in finding a cup of tea than in contemplating the engineering achievement they have just traversed.
The Bull and Bush Ghost Station
Approximately one kilometre north of Hampstead station, in the darkness beneath the Heath, lies one of the most intriguing relics of London's transport history: the Bull and Bush ghost station. This station — officially known as North End — was designed and partially constructed as part of the original Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway, but it was never opened to the public. Its platforms, its tiled walls, and its lift shafts remain in situ, a subterranean monument to a development that never materialised.
The station was planned to serve the area around North End, a rural hamlet at the northern edge of the Heath. In the early 1900s, when the tube line was being designed, there was an expectation that the land around North End would be developed for housing, and a station was considered necessary to serve the anticipated population. The platforms were constructed at a depth of approximately 67 metres below the surface — even deeper than Hampstead station — and the lift shafts were sunk, though the surface building was never completed.
The development that would have justified the station was prevented by the Hampstead Heath Extension Act of 1907, which authorised the purchase of approximately eighty acres of land around North End for inclusion in the public Heath. The Act was the culmination of a long campaign by the Heath preservation movement, and its passage effectively killed any prospect of housing development in the area. Without houses, there would be no passengers; without passengers, there was no commercial case for opening the station. The Bull and Bush was quietly abandoned, its platforms left as a ghostly memorial to the development that never was.
The station's popular name — Bull and Bush — derives from the Old Bull and Bush pub, a celebrated establishment on North End Road that has been serving customers since at least the eighteenth century. The pub was immortalised in the Edwardian music-hall song "Down at the Old Bull and Bush," which was popularised by the Australian-born singer Florrie Forde and became one of the most famous songs of its era. The association between the pub and the ghost station has given the latter a popular currency that its official name — North End — has never achieved, and "Bull and Bush" remains the name by which most Londoners know it.
During the Second World War, the Bull and Bush platforms were requisitioned for government use. The precise nature of this use remains partially classified, but it is known that the station was adapted as an emergency flooding control point for the adjacent tube tunnels and as a storage facility for sensitive documents. There are persistent rumours that the station was designated as a nuclear bunker during the Cold War, but these have never been officially confirmed. The platforms are maintained by Transport for London and are occasionally visited by engineering staff, but they remain closed to the public, and access is strictly controlled.
For railway enthusiasts, the Bull and Bush is one of the great pilgrimage sites of the London Underground. Passengers on northbound Northern Line trains between Hampstead and Golders Green can catch a brief glimpse of the station's tiled walls and empty platform edges as the train passes through the abandoned section of tunnel. The glimpse is fleeting — the train is moving at speed, and the station is unlit — but for those who know what they are looking for, it is a thrilling reminder of the hidden infrastructure that lies beneath the surface of the city.
Wartime Uses and Cold War Secrets
The deep-level tunnels beneath Hampstead played a significant role during the Second World War, when the tube network was pressed into service as a vast network of air-raid shelters. Hampstead station, with its platforms at 58.5 metres below the surface, offered a degree of protection from aerial bombardment that few other shelters could match. During the Blitz of 1940-1941, and again during the V-1 and V-2 attacks of 1944-1945, thousands of Hampstead residents descended into the station each evening, carrying bedding, food, and whatever personal possessions they could manage, and spent the night on the platforms and in the passageways.
The experience of sheltering in the tube was documented by numerous artists and writers, most famously by Henry Moore, whose drawings of sleeping figures in the tube tunnels are among the most powerful images of the home front. Moore lived in Hampstead during the early part of the war — his studio was in Parkhill Road, a few minutes' walk from the station — and his shelter drawings, with their monumental forms and their atmosphere of vulnerable humanity, were inspired by what he saw in the deep-level stations of the Northern Line.
The sheltering arrangements were initially improvised and chaotic. The government had initially resisted the use of tube stations as shelters, fearing that Londoners would develop a "deep shelter mentality" and refuse to emerge during daylight hours. But popular pressure was irresistible, and by October 1940 the authorities had capitulated, installing bunk beds, toilet facilities, and first-aid posts in the larger stations. Hampstead station's depth made it particularly popular with shelterers, and the platforms were regularly filled to capacity during heavy raids.
The Cold War brought new uses for the deep-level infrastructure beneath Hampstead. In the 1950s and 1960s, the government conducted a series of studies into the feasibility of using deep-level tube tunnels as shelters against nuclear attack. Several stations, including some on the Northern Line, were designated as potential emergency government facilities, and structural modifications were made to accommodate blast doors, decontamination equipment, and communication systems. The precise details of these preparations remain classified, and the government has been characteristically reticent about the extent to which the tube network was integrated into Cold War defence planning. But it is known that the deep-level tunnels beneath Hampstead were considered among the most suitable sites in London for underground shelter, and their wartime role laid the groundwork for their Cold War designation.
The Station Today: A Living Piece of Engineering Heritage
Hampstead tube station has been in continuous operation since 22 June 1907, and it shows few signs of its age. The Leslie Green facade has been carefully maintained, its ox-blood terracotta gleaming in the sunlight as freshly as it did on opening day. The interior has been modernised over the years — the original wooden ticket office has been replaced by electronic gates, and the signage has been updated to reflect successive corporate identities — but the essential character of the station is unchanged. The lift shafts, with their art nouveau ironwork and their gently humming machinery, carry passengers down to the platforms with the same unhurried efficiency that they have provided for more than a century.
The lifts themselves have been replaced several times. The original lifts, manufactured by the Otis Elevator Company, were replaced in the 1930s by more modern units, and these in turn were replaced in the 1990s by the current high-speed lifts. Each generation of lifts has been faster and more reliable than its predecessor, and the current units can carry up to twenty-five passengers at a time, completing the journey from surface to platform level in approximately thirty seconds. The sensation of descending through 58.5 metres of London Clay in half a minute is a peculiar one — a combination of ear-popping pressure change and gently accelerating gravity that is quite unlike the experience of any other lift in London.
The platforms at Hampstead station are typical of the deep-level tube stations of the Edwardian period: curved, tiled walls in cream and green, with the station name picked out in a distinctive typeface. The platforms are shorter than those at more modern stations, reflecting the shorter trains that operated on the Hampstead tube when it first opened, and the passageways that connect them are narrow and winding, with none of the spaciousness of the Jubilee Line Extension stations. But the atmosphere is charming rather than claustrophobic, and regular users of the station develop a fondness for its quirks and idiosyncrasies that is akin to the affection that one might feel for an eccentric but reliable old friend.
The station handles approximately five million passenger journeys each year, a figure that has remained remarkably stable over the decades. It is used primarily by residents of Hampstead village and the surrounding streets, many of whom regard it with a proprietary affection that is unusual for a piece of transport infrastructure. The station's depth is a source of local pride — Hampstead residents enjoy informing visitors that their station is the deepest on the network — and the 320-step emergency staircase has become a minor tourist attraction in its own right, even though it is not normally accessible to the public.
The Impact on Hampstead's Development and Character
The opening of the tube station in 1907 was the single most transformative event in Hampstead's modern history. Before the tube, Hampstead was a village — beautiful, intellectually distinguished, but fundamentally remote. After the tube, it was a suburb — still beautiful, still intellectually distinguished, but now connected to the heart of London by a fast, frequent, and affordable transport link. The transformation was not instantaneous — the character of a neighbourhood does not change overnight — but it was decisive, and its effects are still felt today.
The most immediate effect was on property values. Houses within walking distance of the station increased in value significantly in the years following its opening, and new building activity was concentrated along the routes that fed passengers to and from the tube. The commercial life of the village — the shops, the restaurants, the professional offices — was stimulated by the increased footfall that the station generated, and Hampstead High Street began its transformation from a quiet village street into the busy commercial thoroughfare that it is today.
The social character of the neighbourhood was also affected. Before the tube, Hampstead had been home primarily to the wealthy and the retired — people who did not need to commute to work and who could afford the time and expense of the horse-drawn omnibus. The tube opened the village to a wider range of residents: professionals who worked in the City or the West End, artists and writers who needed access to publishers and galleries, academics who taught at the University of London. This influx of new residents brought new energies and new ideas, and it is no coincidence that Hampstead's golden age of intellectual and artistic achievement — the period from roughly 1910 to 1950 — coincided with the era of the tube.
The tube also played a role in preserving the Heath. By making more distant suburbs accessible to commuters, the Northern Line reduced the pressure to develop the open land around Hampstead for housing. The Heath Extension Act of 1907, which saved the land around North End from development, was made possible in part by the tube's ability to carry passengers to stations further north, where cheaper housing could be built on less sensitive land. The irony is precise: the same railway that threatened to suburbanise Hampstead also helped to preserve the rural landscape that makes the village unique.
Today, Hampstead tube station stands as both a working piece of transport infrastructure and a monument to Edwardian engineering ambition. Its depth remains unmatched on the London Underground, and its 320-step staircase continues to inspire a mixture of awe and apprehension in those who contemplate its spiral descent. The Bull and Bush ghost station haunts the imagination of railway enthusiasts and urban explorers. And the tunnels that Yerkes and his engineers bored through the clay more than a century ago continue to carry trains at two-minute intervals, connecting the hilltop village with the city below, just as they have done every day since that June morning in 1907 when the first passengers stepped into the lifts and descended, for the first time, into the deepest station in London.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London's most remarkable neighbourhoods.*